


No Worse for the Wear

by tortoisegirl



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Birthday, M/M, Oral Sex, Ouroboros Mix, Stridercest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-15
Updated: 2013-03-15
Packaged: 2017-12-05 10:32:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/722060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortoisegirl/pseuds/tortoisegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave doesn't like birthdays, but Bro doesn't like Dave being so down on himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Worse for the Wear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unorthodoxCreativity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unorthodoxCreativity/gifts).
  * Inspired by [No Strings Attached](https://archiveofourown.org/works/371716) by [unorthodoxCreativity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unorthodoxCreativity/pseuds/unorthodoxCreativity). 



> This is a remix of unorthodoxCreativity's No Strings Attached, which tells the events of this fic from Dave's point of view. This one will make more sense if you read No Strings Attached first, and either way you should read it anyway!

It's a dumb idea but you're desperate, and it's not like you haven't done dumber before.

And really, you have to do _something_ , because it is your little brother's eighteen birthday and he doesn't seem to give a shit, and that doesn't sit well with you.

In your more optimistic moments you tell yourself it's nothing to worry about, Dave being the way he is. Kids grow up, after all. They keep more to themselves and ask less from the people they once looked up to. They mellow out from creatures of backtalk and perpetual motion into young adults, even if mellow sometimes takes a turn into silence and sleeplessness and solitude, into months and then years of a desolation so thorough it leaves you choked with worry to see it. They grow out of childhood strifes that were, in the end, instructive and well-meant, and instead take up their weapons with ferocious purpose to become viciously, frighteningly deadly, as if they plan to face a world full of the kind of enemies that can be taken down with a sword. 

These things happen, you tell yourself. It could all be normal.

There is a noisy splinter in your brain telling you it's not normal at all, and you're not really one for self-deception anyway.

You have weird dreams these days. "These days" actually stretches back years, if you were to think about it, but you dream about death a lot. Someone who knows more about this kind of thing once told you it's normal for waking life to influence dreams, so - oddly intense as they are - the constant dreams about a strife in a strange oily blue landscape at least make sense. It's all the death that gets you. Yours, frequently; Dave's, less often but leagues more unsettling; other people you don't know but who conjure a kind of dreamstate recognition, like you should know them. When you wake up it feels like there's a puzzle with a huge piece missing. A nagging feeling that you're forgetting something, but magnified until it encompasses your whole life. You get the same feeling when you look at Dave. It's frustrating beyond reason, and meanwhile Dave is moving through life like the walking wounded.

Like you said, you're kind of desperate.

"Get your fat ass out of the chair," you say just after midnight, officially his birthday, Dave's legal entry into adulthood (you say _legal_ because he unofficially crossed the threshold from childhood long ago, sometime when you must have blinked and missed it). "We're going out."

He protests and drags his feet, and you don't even get the wordy, metaphor-laden insults he used to throw at you. You miss his annoying shithead attitude, you're finding.

But you get him in a coat and out to the street. It's pouring, and about as cold as it gets in December in Houston. The rain has emptied the streets of everyone except the determined club-goers and barhoppers, hunched under coats and umbrellas, looking as shifty as the latenighters in this neighborhood usually are, and you're counting yourself among them. Dave spares you the cliche of walking in the rain, sticking close under your big orange umbrella. He keeps his eyes firmly on the sidewalk, and you, as you direct him around corners by pressing your shoulder into his, find your self preoccupied with looking at him. You don't see him much these days - he avoids your company as much possible, spends so much of his time alone - so you take in whatever of him you can see through sideways glances, his profile, and his eyelashes nearly brushing the backs of his shades, and his skin lit by the neon and sodium city lights.

You think Dave is beautiful. Always have, even when he was barely chest high, skinny, sunburned, with acne on his chin and too much gel in his hair. He used to walk around like he knew it too, the universe's 13-year-old gift to mankind, firespitting heartbreaker Dave Strider. He's lost that swagger since he grew up. As tall as you now, wide around the chest, grown into his long limbs so you'd never believe he had a gangly stage, his gloom and doom attitude settles into the way he carries himself, the way he moves. His hair falls limply around his ears because he doesn't care about styling it, and his face is shadowed because he doesn't get enough sleep. And yet it works on him, somehow; he's not a bit less attractive than when he was happy. You'll have to be dead before you stop thinking he's beautiful. 

You still don't know what to do. But it's not like that's ever stopped you before. You're pretty good at taking dumb, impromptu ideas and making them slightly less dumb. The cold air clears your head, and the rain smacking the pavement like bullets strikes a comforting rhythm in you, and as you bring yourself and Dave to a halt in front of the third seediest strip club you know you're feeling better than you have in a while. It's your little brother's birthday, after all.

"Why not?" you ask when Dave balks and digs his heels in the concrete. "It's your birthday today, bro. I know you've never seen a topless lady before," - Dave's expression flickers towards the amusement of one who has been clicking the I Am Over 18 button since before he hit double digits - "so I got us a nice booth that can double as a fainting couch, right up front. C'mon, they've got decent food here."

You suspect he only agrees because he really doesn't care enough to argue.

Low-ceilinged, lit in reds around the edges and brighter lights on stage to draw the eye to the enticing sights on display there, the joint isn't as bad as you expected. On stage a dark haired girl barely older than Dave winds herself around the pole to the beat of heavy bass music, and you grab Dave's arm to make sure he follows you towards her, past the handful of leering men to your booth at the foot of the stage.

It's ironic of course, going to a place like this when neither of you have any interest in it. It's the kind of thing an indulgent older brother would do, a right of passage in taking the young man to his first sleazy institution, but you're not one for traditions or nostalgia so there's irony in indulging the cliche. It's the kind of thing a good upstanding guardian would never encourage a teenager to do, and that's ironic too, because despite what a fuck-up you are, in general and in parenting, you've thrown every piece of yourself into doing what's best for Dave, as a brother, as a guardian, as a...as whatever he needs you to be.

Dave slouches with his shoulders around his ears as soon as his butt hits the booth. You order for both of you when the waitress appears, since he barely gives her or the menu a passing glance, then sit back and try to watch the show. 

You fail miserably to watch the show. You're distracted and fidgety. The heat and throbbing music aren't doing you any good, and _Dave_ \- Dave keeps looking over at you, and touching you. He looks as miserable as ever, but as he kicks you under the table or keeps his gaze on you instead of the dancer, the need to pull him towards you, to touch him, _anything_ , grows stronger.

So you take him to the bathroom and give him a blowjob.

It's sick that this is all you can offer him, but you love him so much you don't know what to do with it. You won't deny you enjoy this; _he_ enjoys this, more importantly. You kneel on the stained linoleum with your face pressed between his legs, holding his thighs to stop your hands from shaking. He knocks off your cap and clasps handfuls of your hair, and when you raise your eyes to him he looks so...not miserable. Relieved, almost, as you curl your tongue against him, like something painful has finally given way. He pours himself into you and you swallow down everything he gives, because if that is what he needs from you, you will do it.

(And it makes you sick with guilt. Because this - this _thing_ between you that he should by all rights despise you for, that should be making him hurt even more than he already is, seems to be the only thing that makes him happy. Which means whatever it is that makes him look like he's tired of living, it's not _this_ \- it's not you. It's something, but it's not _you_. The relief you feel at this may be the worst thing about you.)

After a silent redressing and departure from the bathroom, he sits in the booth with a more alert posture, a little nearer to you than before. You're feeling giddy. Dave is gulping down mouthfuls of food, finally sparing some attention for the stage which now features three girls in nothing but matching g-strings, even grins when you riff on their performance bit. You're still fidgety as hell but for a different reason, high on the things that have happened tonight, and it's giving you dumb ideas.

“I could out-dance these girls any day. Watch me," you announce, sliding out of the booth. It's like watching slow motion, seeing the expressions that pass over Dave's face: disbelief at first, then realization when you strip your shirt off, immediately followed by horror. By the time to raise your arms above your head and thrust your hips at him, he's hiding behind his hands.

You know you're good looking. You can't imagine Dave being as enamored of you as you are of him, but you know he thinks you're good looking, so you play it up. You may have a few gray hairs, and you may feel older than ever next to your little brother who is now a man, but your body finds the rhythm of the music and moves with it like nothing was ever easier. Dave's finally given in and is openly ogling you, which only spurs you on. You make eye contact between the two pairs of shades and you touch yourself through your jeans. There are distant shouts from the other patrons, but you ignore them because Dave is squirming so deliciously in his seat. You're panting now, letting your dancing slip into something more raw, and always, always keeping your eyes on Dave, watching him drink you in.

A waitress eventually cuts you off with a scowl and sharp word. Before you leave, escorted out by a frowning manager with her arms crossed over her chest, you press your body against Dave's until he's shuddering at the contact and whisper "Happy Birthday" into his ear. You touch your hat to the manager, and swing the orange umbrella like a cane as the door clicks shut behind you. 

Outside the cold air is so refreshing in your lungs and on your sweaty skin it makes you dizzy, cleansed of smog and exhaust by the rain, sharp with tobacco from a man smoking below the dripping awning, who gives the two of you a look before turning away, keeping to his business and leaving you to yours. You close your eyes and breathe deep from the frigid air. Just a second a decompress, behind your shades where no one will notice; you haven't done anything like tonight in a long, long time. 

When you open your eyes Dave is staring at you. "You're fucking crazy, you know that."

"Just trying to make you smile, gorgeous. You're never gonna land a man with that sour look on your face all the time."

"And you," he says, coming to your side when you put up the umbrella, falling into step with you on the wet sidewalk, rain tapered off into a fine mist that makes everything soft and diffused, like seeing the world through a veil, "are so full of shit I'm surprised you don't have flies buzzing around you." 

You throw an arm across his shoulders and roar with laughter as you walk.

"Bet you're already planning some dumb idea to top this for my 21st," he says when you've reached the apartment. He squeezes through the door with you, then - reluctantly, you'd like to think - detaches from your side and stands opposite you instead, hands in his pockets. "Reno? Vegas? Bet you got your sparkly showgirl dress all picked out already."

"Disneyland. But I'm still gonna wear the sparkly showgirl dress."

"Mmm. And when you get arrested for trying to give Mickey a lapdance it's my job to seduce the security guard to spring you, right?"

"Think that'll be a problem? I count on your for these things, bro."

"With an ass like mine? It's so little of a problem it's not even tall enough for the rollercoaster."

God, but you love this kid. "Good man."

He pauses, gives you curious look - your eyes lock through the shades, you can tell, just like earlier - then nods, then goes to bed.

You go to bed too, and don't dream of anything.


End file.
